Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Capcom tries to kill used video game sales with the one-save game | DVICE

Capcom tries to kill used video game sales with the one-save game | DVICE

Buying used video games is great for gamers who don't want to pay full price for the latest hits. You know who doesn't like used video games? Game publishers. In a very sad twist, Capcom's fighting back against the second-hand game market with a game that can only support one save file — for life. Resident Evil: Mercenaries for the is a game that once finished, cannot be reset for complete replay. According to both the U.S. and U.K. game's instruction manual "saved data on this software cannot be reset."

Basically what Capcom has done is make Mercenaries a one-time play affair. Once you've unlocked all the goodies and played the entire game, you will not be able to erase the game's save data and start fresh as if it were a new copy. Consider this: lending Mercenaries to a friend, a little brother or sister will be worthless because they'll only be able to continue playing the game with saved settings and create their own.

We get that game publishers don't make any money off sales from used video games, but killing off the ability to hit the reset button is just taking things too far. It's like saying Upperdeck is entitled to a cut in my autographed Michael Jordan basketball card I sold at a garage sale for $10,000 some 25 years after I bought it.

While it can be argued that used video game sales are actually more damaging than piracy, it's still a lowball move for Capcom to make, especially with a franchise as large and significant as the Resident Evil series. Will other publishers follow in Capcom's footsteps to take a stand against the lucrative market of used video games? We really hope this isn't a sign of things to come.

5 comments:

Hey m'man, I think your editing is off...I can see the HTML tags for some reason. D:

Is it me, or is it blogspot's editing tools or somethin'...?

Also, if they take away our used games all they're gonna do is see an increase in piracy. Serious. You can't have your pie and eat it too, and you're completely correct: they have NO say in what we do with our games after we buy them.

None.

They're lucky they get us to even agree to the online regulations and such, but games in our homes?